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Although I know this is a relatively old thread but I followed the fantastic instructions and upgraded my DCT 6412 III to a 1 TB drive ! It's an old unit but still works great! It's a workhorse. In my case, this is on the COGECO cable network in Canada. My DVR runs S/W 78.55 - A28p0-5.1008.r-2, firmware 16.79.

Thanks to everyone before who spent time testing and providing their results...

Although I know this is a relatively old thread but I followed the fantastic instructions and upgraded my DCT 6412 III to a 1 TB drive ! It's an old unit but still works great! It's a workhorse. In my case, this is on the COGECO cable network in Canada. My DVR runs S/W 78.55 - A28p0-5.1008.r-2, firmware 16.79.
Thanks to everyone before who spent time testing and providing their results...

I am a Cox customer in Orange County, California and wanted to upgrade my DCH3416. My goal was to replace a 160 Gig with a 1 TB WD10EADS drive (no jumper used). I followed TN0821's instructions in post number #201 and those instructions can be followed with the following exceptions. There is no more free version of Parted Magic, so I downloaded the paid version (still only $5 and change--well worth it). You will note from the screen shot from the new version of Parted Magic that you can use the Partition Editor to determine the names for your drive and thumb drive (as opposed to the method TN0821 used in post 201). Also, I attached a screen shot showing how to navigate to the command line which is different then TN0821's instructions. The rest of the instructions are the same except that the location of the MotoSTB_1TB.bz2 file is different--it is now located at

It originally did not work, but when i rebooted it worked fine--perhaps there was some issue with giving the incorrect command first. But it did show the progress in terms of the sectors written and the Gigs copied and the seconds so perhaps the "progress" parameters are no longer necessary--not sure. However, I wanted to make sure anyone else who runs into the same problem with the new version of Parted Magic will be able to get through it.

But the best news is after the image was written (took about 4 hours on an older dual core machine), I popped the new drive into the DVR and IT WORKED! Not only do I now have 1TB of space (I noted after 14 hours of HD recordings it showed 12% full--before the upgrade it would be 70 or 80% full with 14 hours), but the DVR works much better as well (i.e., the fast forward, rewind, etc) as well as the commands in the search menu as an example.

Thank you very much to everyone who contributed, especially TN0821 for the instructions on this.

I have edited my guide (post #201) to include your update (though I haven't bothered revising the downloadable PDF, peeps will just need to whip out their tablet or smartphone or print post #201). Thanks!

Thanks very much for your detailed guide on upgrading the HD in the DCT6416.

I went through the procedure with the upgraded Parted Magic and formatted a Western Digital: WD5000AVDS-63U7B1, 500 Gb drive with the MotoSTB_1TB.bz2 image file and at the end of formatting it showed a drive capacity of about 465 Gb. I then installed it in a DCT6416 phase 3 running Cogeco S/W Ver. 78.55-A28po-51008-r-2, and firmware ver. 26.43 . After installation, the drive only showed as 320 GB, with a recording capacity of about 160 Gb.

I noticed an earlier poster was successful at Cogeco but with an earlier version of firmware, perhaps with the updated firmware they no longer permit upgrading?

Thanks very much for your detailed guide on upgrading the HD in the DCT6416.

I went through the procedure with the upgraded Parted Magic and formatted a Western Digital: WD5000AVDS-63U7B1, 500 Gb drive with the MotoSTB_1TB.bz2 image file and at the end of formatting it showed a drive capacity of about 465 Gb. I then installed it in a DCT6416 phase 3 running Cogeco S/W Ver. 78.55-A28po-51008-r-2, and firmware ver. 26.43 . After installation, the drive only showed as 320 GB, with a recording capacity of about 160 Gb.

I think you will need a 1TB drive for this upgrade to work, different sizes or the wrong model of drive may not yield the desired results.

Thanks for the reply. Guess I didn't read the whole thread, thought it would format up to, rather than only a 1 T drive. I have 2 boxes so will have a go at trying the external drive format before I buy a 1 T drive. Merry Christmas.

Get an error message, "The use of an external hard drive is not authorized on your account. Please remove the external drive." Guess I should have read the entire thread, this has probably already been done before too.

Get an error message, "The use of an external hard drive is not authorized on your account. Please remove the external drive." Guess I should have read the entire thread, this has probably already been done before too.

Yes, you will need to format a qualifying Western Digital 1TB drive in a PC, then install the drive inside your Motorola DCT-series DVR.

Finally went back and read the whole thread and realized how instrumental you were in making the process possible and how you got your "handle". Thank you.

I'm now up to 3 DCT6416's from ebay and have 2 500 gb drives so have ordered a 500 gb formatted replacement drive from Palanghast Enterprises in Vancouver. The plan is to just clone the 500gb drives. Before reading the entire thread, I did an experiment last night cloning a DCT6416 formatted 160 gb onto a 500 gb WD using Parted Magic. It did not recognize the partition on the Moto 160 gb disk and refused to do the clone either as disk to disk or disk to image to disk. Since reading the thread, 2 things stand out, first to write zeros to the disk to be formatted and secondly your reference to gforu which uses a bit to bit copy in cloning.

Thanks for your work, and also TN0821, in making the process possible.

Finally went back and read the whole thread and realized how instrumental you were in making the process possible and how you got your "handle". Thank you.

I'm now up to 3 DCT6416's from ebay and have 2 500 gb drives so have ordered a 500 gb formatted replacement drive from Palanghast Enterprises in Vancouver. The plan is to just clone the 500gb drives. Before reading the entire thread, I did an experiment last night cloning a DCT6416 formatted 160 gb onto a 500 gb WD using Parted Magic. It did not recognize the partition on the Moto 160 gb disk and refused to do the clone either as disk to disk or disk to image to disk. Since reading the thread, 2 things stand out, first to write zeros to the disk to be formatted and secondly your reference to gforu which uses a bit to bit copy in cloning.

Thanks for your work, and also TN0821, in making the process possible.

Merry Christmas.

Writing zeros to the drive was only to prepare the original 1TB drive for the initial image that was formatted externally by my brother's DVR. Since I learned that the DVR formatting only took a few moments for a 1TB drive I assumed that most of the drive was left undisturbed. If the DVR only writes to a small portion of the drive then the 1TB drive image should therefore compress better with most of its contents being zeros (and boy did it ever!).

Also be aware that some cable companies are more reluctant than others to activate "unknown" DVRs on their system. I got both my DVRs from ebay and I am fortunate that my cable provider (Access Cable in Saskatchewan), are quite willing to activate DVRs purchased elsewhere so long as the DVR is a supported model. One of my DVRs had previously been on a Shaw Cable network so if I ever want to sell it I can advertise it with this in mind.

I treated a WD 1 TB drive as instructed in this thread and it has been working perfectly in my DVR for about a year. We rarely get over 40% percent full (even with 44 episodes of Duck Dynasty, 2 seasons of Girls (don't ask), and hours and hours of sports. I would like to upgrade to the X1 DVR with its 5 tuners but it only has a 500 GB drive, and that is just not enough storage. I realize the X2 will use cloud storage, but that may be a ways off. Has anyone tried a modified 1 TB drive in an X1?

Also be aware that some cable companies are more reluctant than others to activate "unknown" DVRs on their system. I got both my DVRs from ebay and I am fortunate that my cable provider (Access Cable in Saskatchewan), are quite willing to activate DVRs purchased elsewhere so long as the DVR is a supported model. One of my DVRs had previously been on a Shaw Cable network so if I ever want to sell it I can advertise it with this in mind.

All 3 of my units are installed and activated, Cogeco is not too bad about activating third party units. Depends on who you get, one guy charged me a $15 activation fee but I went along with that as that is only one month's rental.

Now that I know the process, will pick up a 1 Tb drive when I go to Toronto next week and save the shipping charge. May also start cloning the computer hard drives as backups as well.

I treated a WD 1 TB drive as instructed in this thread and it has been working perfectly in my DVR for about a year. We rarely get over 40% percent full (even with 44 episodes of Duck Dynasty, 2 seasons of Girls (don't ask), and hours and hours of sports. I would like to upgrade to the X1 DVR with its 5 tuners but it only has a 500 GB drive, and that is just not enough storage. I realize the X2 will use cloud storage, but that may be a ways off. Has anyone tried a modified 1 TB drive in an X1?

I haven't tried to upgrade the hard drive of an X1 (I haven't seen an X1). I would assume that you could simply pop in a 1 TB hard drive and it would format it for you in the same way that the DCX units do. I would be a bit surprised if you could use any hard drive size larger than 1 TB...I would think they would limit the size for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the really big ones are slower and may not be as well suited for DVR use. And of course the content owners don't like the idea of near limitless end-user storage, so I'm guessing that factors in at least a little.

But anyways, I would highly encourage you to pop a 1 TB hard drive into the X1 and see if it automatically formats it (I'm fairly sure it will and it will format the whole 1 TB, not just 500 GB). If you happen to have a 2 TB drive, you could also give that a shot, though I'm very doubtful that the X1 will agree to format a drive larger than 1 TB.

I just realized that this thread is so narrowly named. With all the new holiday traffic reading this forum, it is probably a good idea for me to briefly mention what this thread is all about:

This thread is about how you can upgrade your Motorola DVR hard drive to 1 TB of recording space. Despite the thread's name, the instructions discussed here work for the following Motorola DVR models:
DCX3400, DCX3500, DCH3416, DCH3412, DCH6416, DCH6412, DCT6412 Phase III, DCT6416 Phase III (The Phase III is important for the DCT models because it denotes the hard drive is SATA instead of IDE)

Some of the above listed models of DVR have only a 120 GB hard drive, so being able to upgrade it to 1 TB is a huge boost that means you will rarely need to delete recordings.

If you have no interest in performing the steps listed in the guide, and instead are merely interested in getting 1 TB of DVR recording space, you really should just purchase a pre-formatted 1 TB hard drive from the following website (the prices came down quite a bit shortly after this how-to guide was posted, so you're really not saving a lot of money doing it yourself unless you already happen to have a 1 TB hard drive sitting around):

Update 2015-Apr-26: I'm rethinking my recommendation of buying a pre-formatted hard drive after checking the prices again. That website is charging $115 USD for the drive, but I'm seeing it on Amazon for $56.20 USD. (Note: that doesn't include the special screwdriver bit for opening the cable box, but those certainly are a lot cheaper than $60). So it probably does pay to shop around before deciding which approach to take. I guess the bottom line is if you don't find this kind of project to be fun or interesting, consider buying a pre-formatted hard drive because you may find that the cost savings of doing it yourself are quite low.

Thanks to your work and also to DCTNeo, I finally got a 1 TB Western Digital drive and formatted it using your procedure and it works fantastically. Cogeco is running a free preview channel, Oasis, till 15 Jan so I plan to fill the drive with that before the free preview runs out. The WD10EZRX runs at 6 gb/s and I tried to get a jumper from the techie at Tiger Direct but he assured me the drive would automatically revert to Sata 1 at 3 gb/s. I didn't trust him and manged to get a jumper from my brother so it is jumpered pins 5-6. If I had more time I might have experimented without the jumper, but it takes 4 hours to reprogram the guide each time I disconnect it. Right now I have 5 hours of HD recorded and it is indicating 3% full so that indicates about 168 hours total capacity.

I realize this thread is pretty old, but there stillmight be some hope of finding an answer, if not I’ll just try it and reportback. I have an old DCT6412, with the Ide disk (DVI but NO HDMI).. Has anyonetried using a IDE->Sata adapter to increase the size of the disk? I thoughtI had read that somewhere a while ago when I’d originally looked into this… I’ve since lost that thread. The beginning ofthis one notes the ancient ALi M1543C IDE controller chip used in the DCT its self won’t support pastlba32, so that would rule out that possibility. However as with anything that’snot always the end story. Was there ever anything additional to the start ofthe thread as a work around to increase beyond the 160 GB IDE? Or is my memory tricking me?CheersJonathan

I realize this thread is pretty old, but there stillmight be some hope of finding an answer, if not I’ll just try it and reportback. I have an old DCT6412, with the Ide disk (DVI but NO HDMI).. Has anyonetried using a IDE->Sata adapter to increase the size of the disk? I thoughtI had read that somewhere a while ago when I’d originally looked into this… I’ve since lost that thread. The beginning ofthis one notes the ancient ALi M1543C IDE controller chip used in the DCT its self won’t support pastlba32, so that would rule out that possibility. However as with anything that’snot always the end story. Was there ever anything additional to the start ofthe thread as a work around to increase beyond the 160 GB IDE? Or is my memory tricking me?CheersJonathan

No. I have not heard of any progress in increasing recording capacity on IDE models. And I was unaware that those IDE models use the ALi M1543C chipset...the way you describe it makes a lot of sense and also makes me doubt that anybody's done it.

Thanks for the guide which was very useful. The problem i have and hopefully someone can help is that the new 1TB hard drive is seen by the firmware (after formatting with external sata drive) but the cable menu (the main regular menu ) sees the old 160GB capacity drive. I let the drive fill up thinking that it will just indicate 100% but keep on recording but the box deletes files once it reaches the 100% capacity limit although there are still over 800GB free. I'm not sure why the main menu still sees the old drive size.

Thanks for the guide which was very useful. The problem i have and hopefully someone can help is that the new 1TB hard drive is seen by the firmware (after formatting with external sata drive) but the cable menu (the main regular menu ) sees the old 160GB capacity drive. I let the drive fill up thinking that it will just indicate 100% but keep on recording but the box deletes files once it reaches the 100% capacity limit although there are still over 800GB free. I'm not sure why the main menu still sees the old drive size.

Any help would be appreciated

Samer

The first picture, where it shows 1000 for the size of the drive, is no indication that the imaging procedure worked. Your cable box is just querying the hard drive and showing its capacity, regardless of how the hard drive partitions are set up.

So I'm thinking that your cable box may have rejected the partitions that you created by following my guide...it may have reformatted it to the default 160 GB partition sizing.

I would recommend trying it again, or at least give us a lot more details of how you went about performing the upgrade.

Keep in mind that there are still cable companies out there using older firmware\software versions that make it impossible to go beyond 160 GB. I'm not sure if Shaw is one of those (Cox certainly was, and in some markets may still be). But I'm thinking that your cable box rejected the new partitions and reformatted to the default 160 GB sizing. I think that previous posters have shown screenshots of what it looks like when outdated firmware\software stops recording at 160 GB...I believe that the Bytes remianing claim that they have 1 TB of total recording space, but it just stops recording when it hits about 160 GB. Your screenshots show that it only claims about 160 GB of available space. So I think copying the image to the 1 TB drive was unsuccessful.

What model of 1 TB hard drive did you use? Has anyone in this thread reported success using that same model?

I managed to update my DCT6412 to a 1GB drive several years ago, but my drive just started failing this week.
The good news is that I was able to find this thread. The bad news is that the MotoSTB_1TB.bz2 file no longer exists on any of the sendspace links.
Could someone please repost it.